Friday, February 10, 2017

Seven Power Hustle Stories about Early Startups

Andrew Chen wrote in his recent essay the key to the future of growth is to execute (growth tactics) thoughtfully and iteratively. Ingenious moves of growth hacking could be luck, a sparkle, a clever thought or simply persistence. You can call it hustling, bootstrapping, hacking. There are some crazy stories. Paul Graham calls it do things that do not scale. Here are 11 founders who did the unthinkable at the dawn of their startups in byte-size stories:

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

On a high level, KNN tries to look for the most similar existing instances (defined by a chosen distance function), then retrieve the corresponding labels. Then using a voting method to decide the final label based on k votes. Voting mechanism could be a simple majority. May weigh instances unevenly. Commonly used distance function is euclidean e.g. as in sklearn. FYI: Euclidean is a special case of Minkowski with p=2

Can modify the weight parameter: uniform treat all neighbors equally, distance as measured in a specified distance function. Can customize func.

KNN

k nearest neigbhors to a given point

k

the number of neighbors

n

the number of data points, data is sorted to speed up the algorithm

distance

Euclidean distance shortest line connecting the points

OR a custom function that defines the distance

visualize

scatter plot, each point is a circle with a radius that include certain number of neighbors

KNN

a query intensive algorithm, not learning intensive

performance

big o notation, log(n) binary search, 1 is constant, n is linear

intuition

KNN stores all the data, then performs a binary search on the data when querying. Linear regression only stores the model y = mx+b. Key concepts: LEARN vs QUERY

Running Time

Space

1 NN 1-nearest neigbhor, 1 dimensional list e.g. [1 2 4 7 8 9]

learning

1

n

KNN all data to storage without learning, so running time is 1 which means constant in Big O notation, and storage space is n for the number of data points

query

log(n) binary search to find one point

1

K NN

learning

1

n

query

log(n) + k binary search log(n) to find one point and the k items next to it in a sorted list

Indulge in the sparkles and glamours of tech giants like Kevin of Instagram, Pinterest, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and famous investors like Ron Conway. It’s hard to resist a selfie even if it is mildly impressing.

Take a selfie. Take lots of selfies.

Chuckle at occasional tech nerd humor squeezed into the ceremony by guest artists, hosts, comedians and even opera singers. Past guest artists include the Daily Show actors.

Drink and hustle. There is a bar with flowing champagnes and cocktails that can give you a boost and bring out your networking inner extrovert. Prep dinero, it ain’t no free ride.

This year’s nominee’s include SpaceX and Pokemon GO! Expect to see Elon Musk and the Niantic studio in the crowd?

What is the Crunchies award ceremony?

Here’s a whimsical opera intro to Crunchies! Enjoy

In short it is the oscars for the tech community where all the startup and tech giants and inner circles meet. Like HBO’s Silicon Valley show? You will likely really enjoy this award ceremony. But if you are not huslting in tech, this event may be nothing more than a selfie opportunity.

Crunchies’ Past

In the past Crunchies, people arrived at the events in style in their fabulous outfits and with their tech gadgets. Travis of Uber had his pampered lap dog with him. People showed off their Google Glasses and Tesla in the past. This year, expect Snap to make a splash with their unique personality and Snap Spectacle glasses before their big IPO.

Past guest speakers included Mayor Ed Lee and Ron Conway “the Godfather of Silicon Valley”. They provide great insights for the future of the Silicon Valley.

My Crunchies’ Past

Fun fact, I shared the stage with Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Meyers and Kevin Systrom of Instagram at the 2012 Crunchies award ceremony. I was at 2 YC startups. Dave McClure 500 startup and I follow each other on Twitter :P

Friday, February 3, 2017

Thinking about getting started with Machine Learning? Silicon Vanity is your go-to resource on the Learn-to-Code movement #learntocode, tutorials and the hottest job trends in the Silicon Valley. Educational tech is dear to my heart. Here are some resources to get you started.

The above resources are more academic than practical. Udacity has tried to marry practicality, industry requirement with academic coursework. The course is still in its early stage of becoming beginner friendly.